The present invention relates to the coring of agricultural products, more specifically, seeds (and even more particularly, soybeans), for research and analysis.
Agricultural product testing, research, analysis and breeding requires the production and handling of a large number of samples. Take, for example, research and development efforts concerning the breeding of improved varieties of seeds, such as, soybeans. Careful analysis of the seeds, and more specifically, the cores, germs and/or endosperms of such seeds (i.e., the samples), is critical to the detection of traits of interest and the efforts to screen seeds for the presence of these traits and effectuate the propagation of desired traits through selective breeding in subsequent generations.
A number of destructive techniques are known in the art for obtaining these samples for analysis. Dissection is one well known method for separating germ from endosperm. Coring is another well known method for recovering a seed core for analysis. Each of these methods is, however, generally manually implemented at great expense of manpower resources, money and time. This, accordingly, significantly adds to the cost of sample analysis and delays its completion. This is especially frustrating in agricultural product breeding programs where the monetary issues significantly raise the overall cost of breeding new seed lines and the time issues can significantly delay the selection process and production of each new generation.
A need therefore exists for an automated technique for producing agricultural samples from seeds. More specifically, a need exists for an automated technique for obtaining cores from seeds, such as, soybeans. Still further, a need exists for a method of more efficiently handling cores for analysis.